


Fairy tale of the Marne

by lilith_morgana



Category: Fantastic Beasts and Where to Find Them (Movies), Harry Potter - J. K. Rowling
Genre: Angst, Canon Compliant, Christmas Truce of 1914, M/M, World War I
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-12-26
Updated: 2018-12-26
Packaged: 2019-09-28 05:15:53
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 5,096
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/17176604
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/lilith_morgana/pseuds/lilith_morgana
Summary: There are days when he imagines that the scar in his palm stings but it’s a phantom pain, like the one in his chest.Set during the Christmas truce of 1914. Angst, war, symbolism and some angry snogging.





	Fairy tale of the Marne

**Author's Note:**

> Ah, so this was inspired by brilliant fic like [Illumine](https://archiveofourown.org/works/17047160), by the seasonal tune Fairy tale of New York (as is evident, I suppose) as well as the actual historical Christmas truce and the actual Battle of Marne which turned into a massive trench warfare that stopped the German advance into France but also locked both parties in a costly siege. 
> 
> It was meant to be a brief thing, but alas, the word count got away from me. I’ll take any excuse to write about these two messing about in historical events, apparently.

**Fairy tale of the Marne**

 

  
1.

The war breaks out like a sudden thunderstorm in early August.  
  
Or perhaps it’s not sudden, per se, but Albus certainly feels a few steps behind, feels detached from the rest of the world. In the Muggle world the Austro-Hungarian heir is murdered and in the wizarding community they write to him at Hogwarts to tell him that Gellert Grindelwald has gained a group of loyalists in Germany. Griselda sends long intellectual essays on the reception of him in the Dual Monarchy, how he’s greeted in the streets like a hero, a saviour during dark times. _He paints a convincing picture of our failures, Albus. I fear him, I truly do. Partly because he’s not entirely wrong._ Elphias reports faithfully of large gatherings in Denmark, Sweden, Finland, Poland. Peaceful meetings; everyone writes about the neat and orderly crowds but the world quietly boils beneath their feet and that could change at any moment.  
  
Albus piles the letters on his desk and folds his arms around himself in his expensive suits, his impeccably crafted teaching outfits. He plans his lessons, reads his students’ essays and navigates between his fellow professors in the castle. They serve meals and Ministry-approved education and one of the brightest wizards alive sits behind a desk talking to twelve-year-olds about the importance of not setting your classmates robes on fire. Albus transforms the admonishing remarks into light-hearted statements, forms his punishments around a quick smile or a pat on the shoulder but the fact remains.  
  
In his head a boy with white-blond hair and a wide, wicked mouth _laughs_.  
  
  
*  
  
  
There are days when he plans on going down to one of the fronts to offer his services to the first person who asks for them. There’s no shortage of things he would be capable of. He could break curses or obliviate Muggles or provide a few charms for the concealments of the still-legal magical efforts - when they eventually become outlawed he could provide plenty of aid for those who wishes to run counter to all recommendations. There are days when he helps the Ministry - through utterly unofficial channels and by means shrouded in deepest secrecy - to set up various front efforts    
  
There are days when he talks to Gellert in his own head and pretends he receives answers.  
  
You were right about the war, he says.  
  
_Of course I was._ _  
_  
You were wrong about so many other things, he says.  
  
_We don’t know that yet, now do we, Albus?_  
  
I miss you, he says and flinches. Every time.  
  
_I know._ _  
_  
There are days when he imagines that the scar in his palm stings but it’s a phantom pain, like the one in his chest.  
  
  
  
*  
  
  
  
War breaks out and rips through the maps.  
  
Unhinged, the beast of it ravages through the streets of Europe, marching the same streets as the letters tells him Gellert has been walking. Reports flood them left and right, offering stories of fighting and resistance, of murders in the night and of sieges, big and small. Some days it’s all Albus can think about. Obsessively, as though there is a detail he has missed - a hidden connection or a pattern. Breathlessly, as though it means something.  
  
_Do you think this is my doing?_ Gellert asks in his head.  
  
_No_. Yes. He runs a hand over his forehead. I don’t know.  
  
_Am I evil then, my Albus? Is this to be the verdict after our many years apart?_  
  
No, he says, without hesitation this time. Although it would be simpler if you were. At least for me.  
  
_You are too magnificent for simple matters._  
  
Flatterer.  
  
  
  
*  
  
  
  
There are days when he leaves the castle grounds to attend Ministry meetings. Every day for a week - the one before Christmas, the one where Winter Solstice commemorates the victory of the light - Albus sits at the tables around Europe and listens as better men and women are debating the wizarding aid in the Muggle war. Everyone knows they are moving rapidly towards a decision against intervention; everyone knows the Ministry will go to any length to protect the Statute of Secrecy.  
  
“Are not wizards citizens? Are we intentionally excluding ourselves from our own nations?”  
  
Henry Potter stares at Evermonde, arms folded across his chest. Then later he stares at the gathered crowd, moving around in the room, using the floor as his stage. Not entirely unlike another politically-minded wizard he once knew, Albus thinks with that familiar _itch_ inside his bones - he’s certainly no less passionate or articulate. And no less doomed to ultimate surrender.  
  
As the ban on wizarding intervention in the Muggle war passes - forty for, sixteen against, a handful of blanks - and the crowd erupts into multilingual crossfire and a promise of further negotiations tomorrow, Albus slips away into the dusk outside the building.  
  
  
  
*  
  
  
  
Once they were mere boys playing at war and Gellert’s hand had rested along the inner of Albus’s thigh while they went through an entire civilization’s worth of military strategy. It had rained for three days, a compact and incessant sort of weather that had driven them from the water and grass to the murky indoors.  
  
The thought of war had elated them then, the way war does when it’s a mere thought dancing around the mind of precocious young revolutionaries. A war of principles to put a stopper to all the injustices, necessary battle to end every wrongdoing of the current order of things. A war of ideals, not military might.  
  
Decisive victories, they had agreed. No war is worth it for less. To subdue the enemy without fighting is the acme of skills.  
  
Gellert had mapped out the border of the Austro-Hungarian empire, the coast of Italy, the rivers of France, the vast stretches of land to the east where the tsars hold power and the crowds are murmuring songs of freedom. He had mapped out the very last front lines of Albus’s self-restraint and crossed them with his mouth open and his eyes on fire.  
  
Merlin’s beard, how young they had been.  
  
  
  
  
  
  
2.  
  
  
He can feel the magical presence in the air a long while before he spots the man himself. The whole of Marne trembles with it.  
  
A dark breach - stronger now than in Godric’s Hollow, vastly more powerful and ruthless - followed by a lighter one that still carries the playful branch of magic that Albus once knew. A magic of long summer days and experimentation with everything within reach - elements, spellwork, _bodies_. It was Gellert who taught him how to mentally _taste_ magical energy, to find its flavour and _oh_ , has it ever been useful in the last fifteen years.  
  
It’s a quaint little spot they have chosen for this particular magical war council - quaint and symbolic, Albus knows Evermonde is an ardent believer in rhetoric figures and potent storytelling so choosing the iconic place for trench warfare is only natural. _This is a Muggle war - the trenches summarize everything that you need to know about this kind of fighting. Magic has no place here. Forgive me for saying so but humanity has no place here. This is madness!_ _  
_  
He walks down the edge of the magical concealment sphere overlooking the support trenches that run like mazes on the ground. Wrapped in magic up on a roof a few hundred metres away the war feels as far away as it would at Hogwarts. Tiny soldiers that walk there, weapons strapped to their backs; from this height they look like mice or ants, unable to discern from one another which seems oddly fitting for such a brutal thing as war. The neutrality of fighting, someone called it once. To be nothing but another body between your cause and your enemy.  
  
Now Albus hears the distinct sound of footsteps approaching. Deliberate steps against the half-frozen ground and the energy bounces, leaps. He takes a deep breath and swallows.  
  
“Gellert,” he says to the shadows. The name swells in his mouth but rolls off his tongue with ease, just like it used to. He keeps his gaze firm on the distant crowds, willing them to remain unseeing, unknowing of whatever atrocities the wizards in the shadows are capable of. “What are you doing here?”  
  
“I believe the Muggles call it Christmas truce.” There’s a beat, a brief pause to the footsteps before the sound returns. “It _is_ Christmas Eve, after all.”  
  
“That’s not an answer.”  
  
A chuckle; he knows exactly how Gellert’s face is composed when he sounds like that, can predict the exact way his mouth trembles and his eyes glitter.  
  
“It is a very good answer, Albus.”  
  
_Albus_. He speaks the name like a promise, a filthy oath. Always has. It had never sounded like that before; it will never sound like that again. In many ways he thinks of his name as something Gellert claimed for himself during that summer.  
  
Finally Albus turns around thinking _nothing can prepare me for this_ but his appearance is composed, his shoulders square and he looks at Gellert Grindelwald like one stares into the face of one’s combatant. A duellist, a gatekeeper, a _guardian_. A Hungarian Horntail, the most lethal of any breed. He blinks and meets Gellert’s eyes.  
  
For a second neither of them speaks. Up here they are one with the sky, are nothing but stars that pin them to the dark and spell out their stories for the world to see. Gellert is endlessly more beautiful than Albus remembers as he takes a step closer - his face is sharper, his hair is shorter; the discrepancy between his tender, soulful eyes and what horrors he is capable of stands out more, like a blow to your gut.  
  
_You look like a Muggle statue of an angel_ , he had told Albus once, flat on his back in the grass with Albus’s mouth against the planes of his stomach, the jutting curve of his hip bone. _You are marvellous._  
  
But he’s the angel, Albus knows this now. Gellert with his angelic features and impossibly soft hair that fits perfectly in Albus’s fist, tied around sweaty fingers on the sheets or around a quill, writing research notes until dawn. Gellert with his endless capacity for cruelty boiling just under the surface - if you break through that soft layer of skin, Albus knows now and wishes he had known then, it will be unleashed on the world. Gellert with his voice, his beautiful, _beautiful_ voice that slips between languages with an ease that has always left Albus breathless. Advanced magic, he had guessed once. Gellert had found it utterly amusing. _Oh that’s not magic, Albus_ , he laughs in his memory. _The simple truth is that English is a brutal mother tongue, it destroys your capacity for others. I learned five languages at Durmstrang. Sheer willpower. Magical translators are crude toys at best and I won’t let the limits of language set the limits for my world._  
  
He hasn’t spoken to him in fifteen years. Fifteen years and four months to be specific and oh, when it comes to Gellert he is. Everything has burned to ashes behind them but even now, even here, he wants to tilt the other man’s head back and kiss him, steal his breath and push him to his knees. It’s a desire that parallels his love for magic, for spellwork and alchemy, a thread of necessity that he cannot erase.    
  
“I never would have thought you cared for traditions, Gellert.”  
  
“You know I do. Only barbarians discard history.” His voice is low and soft - dangerously so - when he approaches; Albus folds his arms across his chest, leaving the wand in his right hand, visible and ready. “And if you have followed our cause in Europe-”  
  
“Don’t call it that,” Albus snaps.  
  
Gellert raises an eyebrow and lets a beat pass in silence. “If you have followed _our cause_ in Europe - which I know you have Albus, I know you _see_ me - you are of course aware that tradition has a part to play. The same goes for respect.” He nods towards the groundside miniature figures and tilts his head slightly to be able to meet Albus’s gaze. Magic runs rampant in this country, burns just beneath the surface of everything. It affects him in a subtle, tickling way; he wonders what it does to Gellert who is, if he remembers correctly, infinitely more in tune with the magical beat of his surroundings. Channels it, harvesting it for dark energy to enhance his dark arts.  
  
“The Muggles can uphold enough respect for a sentimental agreement today,” he continues and his eyes are locking them both in their position, pulsating heavily in Albus’s entire body. “It’s actually dignified that they can do that in the middle of their little war. Inspiring, even. That’s how our reign would work, as well, Albus. Mutual respect for each other’s otherness.”  
  
There’s a cruel sort of exhaustion rushing through Albus, beating him down and he feels like he has to forcibly drag himself up again as he responds.  
  
“I do not believe, not for one second, that you would stop there, Gellert.”  
  
He wishes he did. Merlin help him but he still does.    
  
Gellert frowns, briefly, and something crosses his face. “Why? Because of the Hallows? That was a boy’s quest.”  
  
“Indeed?” Albus nods at the wand that is visible in Gellert’s inner pocket. An exquisite coat of expensive design, a blind man could see that from a great distance. He has never been modest - it’s a terrible flaw and a magnificent trait all at once, a hailstorm of complications launching itself at his feet. “So you did not procure the Elder Wand then? Word travels fast, as you well know.”  
  
_And I see you, as you well know, too._ _  
_  
“I came across it,” Gellert says levelly, as though it had merely been placed within his reach. Albus has heard several versions of the hushed-up story from the shadows of Hogsmeade and Knockturn Alley, has absorbed them all into his knowledge. It has stayed in his heart, the fact that none of the narratives feature a bloodbath. It has stayed in his heart because he, in the words of Gellert Grindelwald himself, is a sentimental fool. “You know it was my favourite Hallow.”  
  
His eyes when he had spoken of it that summer, Albus certainly remembers. The wildfire in them, in him, in their bodies as the talk of the Hallows became a more physical manifestation of their longing. It’s there now, as well, manifesting itself on his skin, written all over his desperately familiar face. He walks back and forth, paces the narrow path between the chimney and the large skylight; if Albus didn’t know better he’d wager the other man was anxiously awaiting something. But with Gellert, he knows, each step is a posture and all the world is his stage.  
  
Albus sighs, takes a few steps away from the roof’s edge. He nearly walks into Gellert but comes to a halt with a few inches to spare.  
  
“Men like you are never satiated until they hold all the power.”  
  
“There are no men like me. Present company excluded, of course.” Gellert shakes his head, an amused sort of smile playing on his lips suddenly, as he regains his ground. Albus wants to tear it off.  
  
“I suppose you consider that a compliment,” he says instead, calmer than he feels. Than he _ever_ feels in Gellert’s company.    
  
“Don’t you?”  
  
“Not anymore,” Albus says and his voice is thin, overly gentle as it falls between them. It mirrors nothing of what he feels, nothing of what takes places in this sphere or in the war neither of them can deny.  
  
Gellert’s gaze on him again, still, as though it’s never left; perhaps all they have ever done for the past decade is watching each other like predators, patiently awaiting the next move of its prey. Or like angels of the unsentimental kind: brutal, beautiful, pitiless.  
  
Muggle mythology states that when an angel moves, it’s face never turns.  
  
  
  
*  
  
  
  
“ _Look_ at them,” Gellert says with disdain coating every syllable. “Look what they’ve done. They’re digging themselves into the ground like animals. Waiting in their dens for the enemy to come.”  
  
“The French stood up for their country.” Albus replies, following the shape of a few of them walking in and out of what he believes is a headquarter of sorts. It is said that tonight, on Christmas Eve, the German soldiers offer tobacco and wine to the Brits, that the French sing German carols with their invaders. _Menschen, die ihr wart verloren._ He supposes it is to be shared as a story of humanity’s triumph; he doubts it reveals much beyond the fact that the groups of men down there are just that - men. Humans with human needs caught in the crossfire of their overlords.  
  
“They couldn’t accomplish a victory so they locked them all in a siege.” Gellert’s voice is grittier than the stone beneath their feet.  “Allons enfants de la patrie, indeed.”  
  
“Would you have them surrender instead?”  
  
The might of magic. The benevolent oligarchy of two wizards with a self-appointed right to rule. It happens that Albus considers what they once believed in - what he in all his bored brilliance once made Gellert verbalise - and feels so much shame that he is unable to look at himself in the mirror for days. Shame and contempt and _fear_ to look too deep into his own mind, reluctant to discover what else he might find in there.  
  
Gellert’s eyes flash icy blue and _burning_. “This is worse than defeat.”  
  
And shows him, cruelly and without mercy, what he means.  
  
  
  
*  
  
  
  
“We wanted the same things,” Gellert says.  
  
Albus looks at a loose brick on top of the chimney, lets it fall and be absorbed by the magical sphere around them. It’s a casual, arrogant sort of magic that reminds him of Godric’s Hollow and of Gellert’s elated rants about what they should and shouldn’t be allowed. Albus can’t stomach it now, it feels vulgar.  
  
“You wanted the Hallows, Gellert. And infinite power. I wanted something else.”  
  
“And what was that?” His voice grows tighter, angrier. If Albus cared to attempt Legilimency now he knows he’d find scattered pieces of guilt and fury that can be traced back to their summer together, to the winter that followed - _the winter of our discontent_ \- the catastrophe. He knows it because he has tried it before. “What _did_ you want, Albus?”  
  
_Freedom. Adventure. To never have to answer to anyone ever again. You._  
  
“A better world,” he says but even his voice is tired from the lies.  
  
Gellert curls his hand around his wand and looks away.  
  
  
  
*  
  
  
  
“You must know that I’m truly sorry for her death?”  
  
Gellert sits by the skylight, tapping his fingers against the fragile-looking glass. From where Albus is standing he looks like a creature from a storybook for children, a dark fairytale of boggarts and dementors, of secret terrors and hidden truths. He’s utterly breathtaking. The mere presence of him again carves a hole in Albus’s chest - in the damned, breaking _world_ \- that cannot be filled with anything less than their skin touching, with Gellert’s ragged voice rasping pleas in Albus’s ear and eventually his surrender. In the end it must always come to that.  
  
“That is not the point,” Albus manages.  
  
“Ariana is not the point?” Gellert sounds incredulous, as though he’s a student who has just figured out the solution to a complex piece of spellwork only to learn that it’s incorrect, that it breaks the cursed object rather than unhexes it. He never did understand family ties, Albus thinks, or how feelings such as love and obligation can interact. He understands duty forged from principle but not the duty that is born out of shame or guilt. Perhaps this is what makes him what he is.  
  
“I don’t blame you for Adriana’s death, you self-centered bastard. It’s not about _you_. It was my fault we were even there. I was - it shouldn’t have come to that.” He shakes his head, reluctant to admit it. Even to himself.  
  
And the worst part is the _elsewhere_ of the death Gellert causes, the alienness of every cruelty committed because it does not happen to Albus personally or in regions remotely close to Albus’s own. It doesn’t matter than he’s spoken at length to Evermonde about the followers and their marching through Europe, his feelings do not alter as he reads the Prophet and spots the signs on every page.  
  
He tries to hide it from everyone, from himself, but part of him think of it as _trivial_ , the plethora of things they accuse Gellert of at this point. Tosses it up among other crimes and atrocities, weighs them all on some invisible scale that he’s important and deluded enough to be the judge of. They say he’s dangerous but where are his victims? They speak of collaborations with the pureblood supremacists, of _sang impure_ and every international blood-obsessed revolutionary group known to wizarding kind. And yet. _Yet_. Gathering followers isn’t a prohibited act, he thinks. Fighting Aurors is nothing out of the ordinary, it happens all the time in Diagon Alley, it happens to the best of them; travelling from country to country in a blaze of elegant propaganda and charismatic crowd-pleasing may be in poor taste but it’s hardly what puts you in Azkaban; those reports of his disciples - that _word_ alone ought to make him cringe - burning down buildings and striking at crowds could be deluded interpretations of Gellert’s orders -  
  
“Then, pray tell, what _is_ the point of all this abstinence?” Gellert asks, voice harsh and unsteady and once again, Albus falls.  
  
Or leaps.  
  
Or perhaps it’s all the same, in the end.  
  
  
  
*  
  
  
  
The first kiss tastes of ashes.  
  
Albus finds himself pressing Gellert down on the roof, finds himself tearing through the thin pretence of their siege by striking first. A loud groan and then Gellert’s mouth opens and his hands are in Albus’s hair as he kisses him back with more passion and less gentleness than he remembers. They had been reverent then, wide-eyed and wordless as they shared the discovery of what Albus, at least, had never even been near before and hasn’t dared to approach ever since.  
  
It feels disturbing now to think that he’s somehow _saving_ himself for this broken angel of destruction and the throaty, filthy laughter that drips out of him, slow and steady and teasing.  
  
“Oh, Albus,” he says, hooking his fingers into the pockets of Albus’s coat to pull him closer. He will tear the fabric with the brute force he’s using, the feverish magic that runs between his mouth and his hands. “So needy. I love that about you.”  
  
The second kiss tastes of blood from a cut on Albus’s chin - a backfiring sort of hex, all instinct and no intellect, a form of magic he despises - and from a crack in Gellert’s lower lip as Albus’s teeth sink into it. He’s hurt, still _hurt_ after all these years and it makes him feral to an extent that embarrasses him beyond words, as it cruelly reinforces that in this world of war and despair he cannot even trust himself.  
  
“You don’t love anything about me,” he grunts as Gellert gets the upper hand and pins him beneath his own body, hot and disheveled and his mouth without mercy, without words beyond a few curses in German.  
  
“One of your many problems, Albus,” he says eventually, shrugging off his coat to get a better reach. “Is that you presume to know what other people think. What other people _feel_.”  
  
There’s something raw in his gaze then, something unhealed and Albus can’t breathe for the implications of that, what depths it could hide. It doesn’t, but it _could_.  
  
They kiss until it aches, until the battlefield feels like an infirmary; Albus scrapes Gellert’s back against the rough stones and is, in turn, bruised from the way Gellert holds him as Albus finds his cock in the well-tailored trousers and he pants, hard and impatient, his heels digging into Albus’s calves and then they spin around again. Albus on his back, his palms against Gellert’s pale chest where old marks intertwine with newer trespasses - the rumours of his whereabouts are never detailed enough to chronicle potential damage done to him, never detailed _enough_ \- and cradles the other man’s body like their lives depended on it, cradles it even harder as he turns them over one final time.  
  
Gellert draws a sharp breath, hissing through his teeth.  
  
“Always on top, my Albus.”  
  
An angry thought flash at the surface of his mind - _I’m not yours_ \- but he doesn’t pronounce it, it wouldn’t be true and then, eventually, they both run out of languages.  
  
  
  
*  
  
  
  
  
The night stills as dawn approaches.  
  
Down there the scant few lights from Muggle civilisation form a path that never reaches up here where the pitch-black night sky engulfs them and Albus feels the approaching day like a restlessness in his bones. Soon the night will be over. The temporary truce will have ceased. He wonders what the soldiers are thinking this very moment. If they are sleeping unafraid or more afraid than ever, ready to fight back as a sneak attack creeps up on them. He has a difficult time picturing Muggle warfare any more honourable than the wizarding equivalence, regardless of what crowd-pleasing nonsense Gellert incorporates into his speeches.    
  
Gellert who buttons his shirt with great care, deliberately slow and sauntering, so very well aware of his appeal, the almost gravitational pull that surrounds him. Biting back a bitter remark, Albus cannot stop his own mind from thinking about the nights just like this one, the clandestine meetings with willing followers.  
  
“I talk to you.” Albus leans against the chimney now, resting against the bricks behind him. It is a remarkably strange night, all things considered. A night made for sordid confessions. “In my head.”  
  
“I know,” Gellert says. He stands in front of him, hands at his sides and open, as though he’s turning them towards Albus. A small smile plays at the corners of his mouth.  
  
“Liar.” But there’s a _shudder_ in his body at the thought, a cold wind that cuts through him.  
  
This - all of it - is beside time itself, a discontinuance from its strict order. Neutral ground, they had claimed at the wizarding council earlier today, neutral ground for their deeply tendentious meeting. As though a siege is a settled matter. As though both sides do not continually bleed or lose, little by little until they have been defeated through sheer exhaustion. Albus pities the soldiers down there - like a god he stands up here with his useless pity, his motionless despair. Miserere, miserere, we don’t care about your offerings; you will die like dogs for no good reason.  
  
Gellert is so close now, less than a breath away.  
  
“Of course I lie,” he says in that low, gentle tone he has when he wants Albus to surrender. “I lie about a lot of things. As do you, my Albus, or you would not stand here tonight. But I would never lie to you. Truth is a beautiful and terrible thing - I keep mine for the only one worthy of it.”    
  
Albus looks away, looks at the faintly pink light of dawn.  
  
“Your truth is wasted on me, Gellert.”  
  
“Don’t say that.” His hand around Albus’s wrist, his other hand travelling up to the cut on his chin. It’s still bleeding, quite profusely and Gellert places his thumb on it. “ _Tergeo_.”  
  
“What do you _want_?”  
  
“You know what I want, Albus.” If the man in front of him - the man whose thumb is still tracing the curve of his mouth - had been anyone else he would think his voice sounds sad. Regretful. But this is just a play on an unknowing stage and Albus can’t participate.  
  
Now dawn is definitely breaking and the concealment charms will wear off shortly. He takes a step to the side, feels Gellert’s grip of him linger but then cease entirely as Albus pulls away. They look at each other for a moment, smooths out the already smooth clothes and adjusts whatever composure that must be in place before leaving this rooftop.  
  
“Albus?” Gellert stands with his hands in his pockets and the hair looks golden in the growing light of day. His lips are soft and round and his gaze is unforgiving. Ever the angel, fallen or not. “Stay away from the war. This one isn’t ours. It will be terrible and bloody, but it will not be ours.”  
  
Albus doesn’t answer as he turns on his heel, throws one last look over his shoulder and Disapparates.  
  
  
  
  
  
3.  
  
  
War ravages city after city, country after country. It is, they say, the great war.  
  
He knows Aberforth is down by the Eastern front, among the rouge curse-breakers that operate independently from the Ministry and answer to the neutral Swedish authorities. He hears about their projects and successes, he sends a student or two their way whenever he can. Occasionally he reads something that carries Gellert’s brand of magic and for a moment or two he cannot breathe. He learns about small fractions of purebloods moving against their governments and laws, positioning themselves at the fringes of society which is exactly where someone like Gellert would want people like them. There they will be easy victims, easy targets, perfectly willing to run into his arms. Albus knows because he knows this is what he would have done.   
  
It disgusts him. Wretches him if he lets it, sits in his chest like a dementor, only for all his world-famous spellwork he cannot drive it out because its roots are not made from magic but _shame_.  
  
He remains at Hogwarts to protect the students.  
  
To protect himself.  
  
For the entire war he only looks into a mirror when he needs to shave and barely even then.

 

  
  
  
  


* * *

 

I swear, half the fun of this ship and the Rowling-verse in general is the gratuitous amount of references I’m allowed to scatter everywhere. Bet you pick up on all of them but here are a few pointers in case you didn’t:

\--- “There are no men like me.” I can’t help but think of Gellert as a Lannister.  
  
\--- The limits of my language are the limits of my world, said Wittgenstein. _  
_ _  
_ \--- To subdue the enemy without fighting is the acme of skills. -- Sun Tzu  
  
_\--- Menschen, die ihr wart verloren_ (humans, you who were lost) is a Christmas carol.


End file.
